An Unabashed Appreciation of Smitten Kitchen, the Ur-Food Blog

Deb Perelman’s cookbook “Smitten Kitchen Every Day” delivers more of the recipes that fans of her blog love.

Photograph by Robert Caplin / NYT / Redux

It’s hard to remember this now, in the era of professional Instagram
influencers, but there was a time, not too long ago, when many ordinary
people just . . . had blogs. From about 2002 through 2006, once the Internet
had stopped being the exclusive province of people with real technical
expertise, and right before the dawn of widespread social-media use,
WordPress and Movable Type made it possible for civilians with only a
tiny bit of HTML at their fingertips to launch their own small
publications. They wrote about bands and books and their love lives,
often with no real goal beyond recording their daily existences. Some of
these people managed to garner real readerships. One of them was Deb
Perelman, a New Jersey native living in New York City, who, in 2003,
started a blog to write about her bad dates. After meeting the man who
would become her husband, she pivoted to writing about her domestic
life, especially cooking and eating. Eventually, she named the blog
Smitten Kitchen.

Today, almost all of the personal blogs that began in the early aughts
are gone, but Smitten Kitchen remains. Not only does it remain: it
thrives; it grows. Simultaneously, it retains both editorial
independence and Deb’s unmistakable funny earnestness. Her mission is
the same as it’s been for many years: to make recipes as good as they
possibly can be. Her tone has remained essentially unchanged since her
first tentative
post,
about the glory of “the damp spot on top of a ripe tomato when you twist
the vine off. It smells like summer to me, back when tomatoes came free
from our backyard and not at surprising sums from Holland.” Smitten
Kitchen, these days, is not just a food blog: it is the food blog,
what many people think of when you say those words. And now, with the
publication of Deb’s second cookbook—“Smitten Kitchen Every
Day”—it
is poised to take Deb into the realm of her lodestars, the Inas,
Marthas, and Nigellas she jokingly writes about imagining herself to be.

I have, full disclosure, been a part of the same blog-generation as Deb
long enough to have had many lovely e-mail and Twitter interactions with
her, and also to have once met her in person (an occasion on which I was
completely starstruck). But most of my disturbingly encyclopedic
knowledge of everything S.K.—the way Deb’s recipe-making mind works, her
family dynamics, her likes and dislikes—comes from being a longtime
reader, and from having cooked and eaten probably hundreds of her
recipes. She’ll write something like “The second I had these ingredients
together—lemon, tahini, butternut squash, garlic, chickpeas—I couldn’t
believe it was the first time,” and I’ll suddenly be convinced that I
need to make a warm butternut-squash
salad for dinner. I love the work of many other food writers, but there’s no
other cook with whom I’ve achieved quite this level of one-sided
intimacy. And I’m not some outlier weirdo here! To prove it, I asked a
friend who has also been an S.K. reader since the beginning to quickly
list five things she knows about Deb’s palate. She responded in seconds:
“1. Doesn’t do fish. 2. Will fritter anything. 3. Thinks of crepes as an
easy make-ahead food 4. Not hugely into spicy food 5. Isn’t afraid to
rework a complicated recipe or dumb down ingredients from a traditional
one.”

This is pretty much the same list I’d make, though I’d never noticed the
crêpe detail, and I’m inclined to give Deb credit for trying to become
more fish-curious. But I’d add another item, and probably list it first:
the enduring backbone of the S.K. aesthetic is that Deb is a
recovering vegetarian who sees meat as a form of seasoning. She
definitely doesn’t think it’s a requisite part of a complete meal. This
contributes to the over-all affordability of cooking the S.K. way,
something that other cookbook authors seem not to take into account when
devising their recipes, unless they’re specifically writing about cooking
on a budget. Deb assumes, rightly, that almost everyone is on a budget,
and builds frugality into her recipes in small but welcome ways. She
will never ask you to use a tiny amount of a big-ticket item that only
comes in large quantities, for example. She has genuine love for beans,
grains, eggs, and tofu. In this sense, her cookbooks are a part of the
legacy of Mollie Katzen, who popularized hearty, mushroomy vegetarian
main dishes in her “Moosewood Cookbook” and its sequels.

Everyone I know who cooks has a favorite S.K. recipe. From the new book,
I already have a few keepers, and many that I’ve bookmarked to try. I love it
when Deb tries to replicate the humble, takeout-y foods of N.Y.C., which
she somehow manages to do without being gimmicky. Her at-home halal-cart
chicken, complete with copious “white sauce,” provides all the primal
satisfaction of the original, and she has unlocked the secret of the
carrot-ginger dressing that comes on sushi-bar salads, which I will
always think of as Dojo dressing, after the wallet-friendly restaurant
near N.Y.U. (The secret: white miso.) I also can’t wait to try a few of
the weirder-sounding dishes, like “caramelized cabbage risotto.” Deb
really, really loves cabbage. She explains that this is because she
wasn’t served it growing up, and thus never developed an aversion: she
loves it “with the open-hearted abandon of someone who chose it.”

Such is Deb’s power: I trust her when she tells me that something called
“sesame-peanut pesto” is worth getting out the Cuisinart for, and that I
should serve “loaded breakfast potato skins” at my next brunch. I know
that Deb isn’t padding with filler to reach a page count or to churn out
content; her commitment to the recipes she creates is evangelical and
absolute. It sounds like a job-interview cliché, but if she has a flaw
it is, truly, her perfectionism: she weighs ingredients and calibrates
cooking times precisely, and this baker’s mind-set can sometimes irk
when you’re just trying to make a salad. But if you do follow her
thoroughly tested recipes to the letter—like, say, her reworking of
classic canned-soup green-bean
casserole,
perfect for Thanksgiving—you are inevitably rewarded. Dinner is served,
and you will likely be tempted to write about it online, or at least
post a picture of it to Instagram.